CSI: Las Vegas Episode 11 "Man up"

The episode starts with the lab gang analysing a picture online of a dead girl with the Las Vegas Strip in the background. Hodges thinks it's a corpse. As public servants, if there is a DB, a dead body, they have to investigate it. Her arms are flexed, there is lividity in the tissues, but they aren't sure. Nick bets $100 the picture is a fake, but the points look real enough to investigate the site. Brass comments later being disturbed that the staff is looking for "work" online in their free time.

There is a dead body there, just like in the image, with a crowd of people with cellphones standing around. Agent angrily asks why nobody called 911. Nick starts grabbing people's cellphones for evidence and then nabbing people to give evidence as witnesses. Soon the scene is offering too many arrows pointing in different directions. A dead young woman in a black cocktail dress lies draped over a pile of junk. Willows takes a closer look.

Meanwhile Hodges gets ripped off buying a "vintage" bike at a swap meet that Langston details as a mishmash of totally disparate era parts. But Langston (Lawrence Fishburne) finds blood on the internal pipe mesh and cites that the bike just became a crime scene. The dead girl, meanwhile, has a boyfriend who assumed she was a model and her hours were consistent with the industry.

The clues on the dead girl scene puzzle the CSI team. There is a shred of a gladiator costume Willows recognises. She also notices that the dress is not the same as in the photograph. They realize the posed body is not the same person as in the site. the girl was a local hooker and they track her habitual whereabouts from forensic clues. The Spartan costume shred is from a man accosted in a men's room, and the mystery deepens.

The CSI team realize the various items depict a trophy hunt. The internet files from the web host show the related uploads. They find the dead prostitute and her last client, red headed comedian Carrot Top. He details how these men paid for him to get friendly and take a limo ride with her. The fingerprints lead to a trio of men vacationing in Vegas, the collection of weird images online a snipe hunt, or "Bucket list", as Stokes says. Gladiator sword, dead hooker, luxury car, and so on. But the men identified hunting the items state emphatically the girl isn't dead. Unfortunately, they sent the dead girl a photo of the prank.

Turns out two of the men played the third for a fish, inventing off the wall items so the loser would pay. They paid the hooker to pose for the phony murder shot. Angry at being set up, the "fish" acted rashly. Taking the game seriously, he hunted up a hooker to match the photo and killed her, posing it to look like the one they took. When the third man found the hooker like the one who had mocked him, he had the image ready to work from.

The motorcycle mystery is solved for Hodges when they locate the junk-yard the parts came from. Hodges discovers the provenance of the patchwork bike when he surveys the junk-yard. Unreported amidst a freak accident involving two buses crashing head on with each other, a man taking to the open road biting the dust between them generated the "spare parts" the motorcycle was rebuilt with.